Plattner Geophysics Group





Regional and subregional crustal magnetic field inversion for the Martian south polar area using altitude-cognizant gradient vector Slepian functions. See our Mars South Pole paper on my publications site.
Electrical resistivity tomography and time-domain induced polarization to study a native-american platform mound.
Ground penetrating radar profiles of the Royal Arches Meadow Rock Avalanche in Yosemite Valley, California.
Students using GPR on campus for educational purposes..
Local crustal magnetic field model of the Martian Southern Highlands.
GPRPy graphical user interface for ground penetrating radar data processing and visualization. Freely available on GitHub
 

Alain Plattner CV


Welcome to the planetary and near-surface geophysics group led by Alain Plattner

We are part of the Department of Geological Sciences at the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa.

You can find more information about current and past research on the research page. The publications page contains links to pdfs of published articles.

Our group studies magnetic fields of planetry bodies in our solar system from satellite data to infer the geologic history and structure of these planetary bodies. To date we have studied the planets Mars and Mercury, and the Jovian moon Ganymede.

We also use near-surface geophysical instrumentation to look into the shallow subsurface here on the Earth. This work is typically with colleagues in archaeology, biology, hydrology, basically any field of study that can profit from information of the shallow subsurface.


Software packages

GPRPy is a free graphical user interface-based ground penetrating radar processing and visualization tool. It is Python based and hence all of its prerequisites are also completely free. If you find GPRPy useful, please cite my GPRPy paper "Plattner, A. M. (2020). Gprpy: open-source ground-penetrating radar processing and visualization software. Leading Edge 39(5), 332–337. doi: 10.1190/tle39050332.1". For news and updates on GPRPy, please follow this Twitter account (gprpysoftware).

For my planetary potential-field geophysics research, my Matlab/Octave software to construct and use classical and altitude-cognizant vector Slepian functions can be conveniently installed using the scripts and demo functions on this Slepian Git repository. The scripts will automatically download the software from Slepian_alpha through Slepian_hotel and setup the folder structure.

 

News

December 2023

Our research article on local magnetic source depth inversions got accepted for publication. It is freely available from here


 
 

Background figure

The figure in the background shows the recently-discovered core-field anomaly on Mercury, plotted over Mercury's topography.

 
 

Alain Plattner
Department of Geological Sciences
University of Alabama
201 7th Avenue
Room 2023 Bevill Building
Tuscaloosa, AL 35487


Email: amplattner (at) ua (dot) edu